Late Essays : 2006-2017

by J. M. Coetzee

  Although Beckett had already been at work on Watt when they left Paris, the bulk of the book was written in Roussillon. In 1945, after the war had ended, he submitted it to a series of British publishers, without success (one described it as too ‘wild and unintelligible’ to publish). Gradually, as he threw himself into new projects, he lost interest in the fate of Watt. In a letter to a friend he dismissed it as ‘an unsatisfactory book, written in dribs and drabs, first on the run, then of an evening after the clodhopping [i.e., farm labour], during the occupation’.1

  In part because the British public had shown so little interest in his work, in part because he had come to feel that what he called ‘official’ English was frustrating his ambition to write ‘a literature of the non-word’, but mainly because he had decided that his future lay in France, Beckett began to compose in French. ‘I do not think I shall write very much in English in the future,’ he confided to the same friend.2

  Watt was eventually published, in 1953, by an English-language literary review based in Paris, in association with a French publisher of erotic literature (Olympia Press, later to publish Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita). Its distribution in Ireland was banned by the authorities.

  After he had become famous, and the anglophone world had woken up to his existence, Beckett routinely prepared English translations of his works. Watt was an exception: he did not want the book to be translated at all. Under pressure from his publishers, he at last agreed to permit a French edition. However, the job was (in his eyes) so poorly done that he revised the translation himself, making a number of changes to the text in the process. There is thus some question whether the English or the French version should be regarded as definitive.

  The ambivalence of Beckett’s feelings about the book can to an extent be attributed to the circumstances of its composition, in the remote countryside, in enforced and wearisome isolation. It is hard to believe at any other time in his life Beckett would have had the energy or the interest to list laboriously the eighty different ways in which four items of furniture can be arranged in a room over the course of twenty days, or to describe the twenty individual glances that have to be passed before the five members of a committee can be sure that each has glanced at each of the others. Beckett was right to claim that there is a certain madness in the Cartesian project of methodizing the operations of the human intellect; but there was also a certain madness in the form that his satire of methodized reason took.

  Watt, the eponymous hero, is – at first sight – a clownish man with a strange method of walking, which he seems to have learned out of a book, and not even the most rudimentary social graces. We observe him catch a train from the city of Dublin to the suburb of Foxrock, where he makes his way to the home of one Mr Knott, for whom he has been engaged as a manservant. In a lengthy monologue, Arsene, the servant whom he will be replacing, explains the workings of the Knott household: there are always two servants on the premises, he says, of whom only the senior or greater has direct access to the master.

  Watt spends a period (a year?) as the lesser servant, then a period as the greater servant, then in turn departs. After an unspecified interval we come upon him again in an asylum for the insane, where he is befriended by a patient named Sam. To Sam he relates in garbled form the story of his time in the Knott household. This Sam in turn relates to us, in the form of a book titled Watt.

  Watt’s years with Mr Knott (as related by Sam) may have been uneventful, yet the experience must have been disturbing enough (we infer) to render him insane. He has lost his mind because, despite his most strenuous efforts, he failed to understand Mr Knott (and his household) – more specifically, failed to know Mr Knott in his fullness. Everything that Mr Knott did, everything that happened in his household, he subjected to exhaustive rational analysis, yet in every instance the analysis failed to reveal with certainty the truth of Mr Knott. At the end of Watt’s stay Mr Knott was as much of a mystery as he was on the day when Watt arrived.

  To the reader, viewing Mr Knott and his household from the outside, there is nothing mysterious going on, nothing worthy of prolonged investigation. Mr Knott is simply an eccentric old man who lives in a big house in Foxrock which he never leaves. But – though the final words of the book, ‘no symbols where none intended’, constitute an authorial warning against over-interpretation – the book has no raison d’être if we do not (provisionally) accede to Watt’s inarticulate and unexpressed vision of the household: that Mr Knott is in some sense the Deity and that he, Watt, has been summoned to serve Him.3 In this interpretation, Watt’s failure to know God results from a failure of the intellect, a failure of human reason, a failure of the method (learned, like walking, out of a book) that he employs in order to arrive at knowledge of the divine.

  The method in question derives from René Descartes. It was set down by Descartes in 1637 in his Discourse on the Method of Rightly Conducting the Reason, since when it has been the orthodoxy of the scientific enterprise:

  To accept nothing as true which I do not clearly recognize to be so; that is to say, to accept nothing unless presented to my mind so clearly and distinctly that I can have no occasion to doubt it.

  To divide up each of the difficulties which I examine into as many parts as possible.

  To carry on my reflections in due order, commencing with objects that are the most simple and easy to understand, in order to rise little by little … to knowledge of the most complex.

  In all cases to make enumerations so complete and reviews so general that I shall be certain of having omitted nothing.4

  This is the method that Watt applies to all phenomena that present themselves to his senses, from the visit of the piano tuners to the activities of Mr Knott himself. The sober, unquestioning application of the Cartesian method, the method of science, to events in the Knott household results in the intellectual comedy that makes up the bulk of Watt.

  Watt is a philosophical satire in the tradition of François Rabelais and (closer to home) of Jonathan Swift and Laurence Sterne. But the impulse behind it is not merely sceptical (sceptical of the arch-advocate of the cultivation of scepticism as a habit of mind, Descartes). If we decode the cryptic, back-to-front utterances of Watt in the asylum, we arrive at a clue as to what that impulse is:

  Of nought. To the source. To the teacher. To the temple. To him I brought. This emptied heart. These emptied hands. This mind ignoring. This body homeless. To love him my little reviled. My little rejected to have him. My little to learn him forgot. Abandoned my little to find him. (p. 166)

  [Reviled my little to love him; rejected my little to have him; forgot my little to learn him; abandoned my little to find him. To him I brought this emptied heart, these emptied hands, this ignoring mind, this homeless body: to the temple, to the teacher, to the source of nought.]

  Watt seeks to know God or ‘God’, for whom Knott/Not stands as a token. He undertakes his quest in a spirit of humility, without preconceptions; but Knott proves to be unknowable – unknowable not only to the rational intellect but ultimately unknowable too. As St Augustine could have told Watt, we can never know what God is, we can only know what He is not. Indeed, on the very first day of his service Arsene had given him a warning to the same effect: ‘What we [servants] know partakes in no small measure of the nature of what has so happily been called the unutterable or ineffable, so that any attempt to utter or eff it is doomed to fail, doomed, doomed to fail’. (p. 62)

  Arsene is here evoking a passage from Geulincx’s Ethics that Beckett had thought important enough to copy into one of his notebooks: ‘Ineffabile … id est dicitur, non quod cogitare aut effari non possumus (noc enim nihil esset: num nihil et non cogitabile idem sunt)’ [‘Ineffable … is that which we cannot understand and grasp (which is nothing: in fact, nothing and not thinkable are the same thing)’].5

  It is this deeper layer beneath the surface comedy of Watt’s behaviour, his dogged metaphysical quest to know the unknowable, think the unthinkable, expres
s the inexpressible, in the face of failure after failure, that lends him his pathos, makes him more than just a clown of the intellect.

  As a piece of writing, Watt is uneven in quality. In his early stories, collected in More Pricks Than Kicks, Beckett had a tendency to show off his learning in a rather juvenile way, to mix high and low verbal registers and indulge in facile wordplay. The opening pages of Watt exhibit some of the same features. It is only when Watt reaches Knott’s residence that Beckett begins to achieve the kind of sustained prose he has been searching for, the blend of lyricism and parody unique to Watt. Some of the episodes that make up a fundamentally episodic book maintain the quality of a high comic aria from beginning to end (one thinks here not only of Arsene’s monologue but of the visit of the Galls, father and son; of Mr Knott’s eating arrangements; of the famished dog required to consume the leftovers of his meal, and the Lynch family whose duty it is to maintain the dog). Other episodes lack inspiration: the visits of Mrs Gorman the fish-woman, for instance. The pages-long listings of permutations and combinations of objects are tedious but their tedium is part of the conception of the book, a fable cum treatise that for long stretches manages to be hypnotically fascinating.

  17. Samuel Beckett, Molloy

  Samuel Beckett was an Irishman who during his early career wrote in his native English but for his later and more important work switched to French. The break between the English and French phases of his career was defined by the Second World War. When the war broke out Beckett was resident in Paris. As a citizen of a neutral country he ought to have been able to carry on with his life under the German occupation; but his activities on behalf of the French Resistance forced him to go into hiding in the rural South. It was there that he composed his last substantial work in English, the novel Watt.

  The great creative period in his life, the period that brought into being the Trois romans (published 1951–3), as well as the groundbreaking play En attendant Godot (first performed in 1953), came shortly after the war, between 1946 and 1949. The work he wrote thereafter, fiction and theatre, was commanding but did not exceed in its ambitions the work of his great period or take him in new directions. The Trois romans, of which Molloy was the first, would remain his most enduring achievement in fiction.

  Why did Beckett move from writing in English to writing in French? Part of the answer must be that by 1946 it had become clear to him that France was and would in future be his home. Another part of the answer was that the French language was hospitable to a savage directness of tone that he wanted to cultivate. This capacity of French had been more than adequately demonstrated by Louis-Ferdinand Céline in his novels Voyage au bout de la nuit (1932) and Mort à credit (1936).

  Molloy is a mysterious work, inviting interpretation and resisting it at the same time. Is it a story about two men, Molloy and Moran, or are Molloy and Moran the same person? How does time work in the world where Molloy and Moran (or Molloy/Moran) have their existence: does it move forward linearly or does it come around in a circle? Do the beings who issue commands to Moran belong to this world or to another one?

  The task of reducing Molloy to order has preoccupied scholars of Beckett’s work. One way that has been proposed to make sense of the book is to read the second section as a work of fiction written by Molloy about a character named Moran who sets out on a journey to find his author. Moran’s outward journey is then a metaphor for Molloy’s journey into himself; Moran eventually ‘finds’ Molloy, his author, by turning into him. The first objective sign of this metamorphosis is the sudden pain in his knee that ends up paralysing his leg, leaving him in the same quandary as Molloy at the beginning of the book, needing to ride a bicycle with only one good leg.

  But we may equally plausibly argue that Moran, not Molloy, is the figure of the author. At the end of his narrative, obeying a voice that tells him to submit a report on his failed quest for Molloy, Moran writes as follows:

  Then I went back into the house and wrote, It is midnight. The rain is beating on the window. It was not midnight. It was not raining.1

  If someone writes that the rain is beating on the window when in fact the rain is not beating on the window, he is lying or, more grandly, producing a fiction. Do these cryptic final sentences hint that Moran has from the beginning been the author of the work of fiction we are reading? In that case, is Moran not just another name for Beckett?

  The fact that there is no consensus on how – at this most basic level – to read the novel suggests that we may need to put aside the question of how to make it rationally explicable, how to reduce it to order. Trying to make sense of Molloy may not be the best or most fruitful way to approach the book.

  The reader’s first impression and most enduring memory of Molloy is of its prose, which is both gripping and subtle, a vehicle that Beckett is here in the process of fashioning for his own powerful and subtle intelligence. In each half of the book, but particularly in the first, the monologue drives relentlessly forward; yet its forward motion is held in check by doubts and qualifications, most of them darkly comic. Out of the struggle between, on the one hand, the inexplicable, quasi-physical drive to move forward, and on the other the braking power of the critical intellect, comes the characteristic movement of Beckett’s fictional prose, elegant in the flow of its verbal music yet compulsively turning in upon itself.

  Beckett is commonly thought of as an ‘intellectual’ writer. He was certainly a man of acute intellect and wide learning. But from this it does not follow that the intellect was the wellspring of his writing. More than any other work of his, Molloy comes from a source deep within its author, a source perhaps inaccessible to the intellect. With greater and greater confidence, Beckett was able to draw upon the source that had opened itself to him in Molloy in a larger creative project that would change the face of contemporary theatre and might have changed the face of contemporary fiction too if his novels had achieved the same wide exposure as his plays.

  Molloy is, among other things, a story, or two interlocked stories told by two interlocked narrators: Molloy (no forename) and Moran (forename Jacques).

  Should one call Molloy and Moran characters or should one call them voices? Molloy is a tramp or vagabond, decrepit and given to bouts of sudden violence. Moran is a comfortably situated widower (or so one infers – he has a son but there is no mention of a wife), rigid in his habits, malicious in spirit, profoundly self-satisfied. To a degree, then, each has both a place in society, or at least on its fringes, and a set of personal characteristics making up a ‘personality’. To a degree, each conforms to the common notion of what a novelistic character should be. Furthermore, with the passage of time one of the two, Moran, can be said to ‘develop’ in the way that characters in the classic novel do: he becomes less rigid, less sure of himself, even humble. (Molloy does not change: he remains as he is from beginning to end.)

  Yet after reading the book the memory that one retains is not of having been in the company of a personage or two personages, but of having listened to, or been inhabited by, a voice or voices. Here is the voice that calls itself ‘Molloy’:

  It is not the kind of place where you go, but where you find yourself, sometimes, not knowing how, and which you cannot leave at will, and where you find yourself without any pleasure, but with more perhaps than in those places you can escape from, by making an effort, places of mystery, full of the familiar mysteries. I listen and the voice is of a world collapsing endlessly, a frozen world, under a faint untroubled sky, enough to see by, yes, and frozen too. And I hear it murmur that all wilts and yields, as if loaded down, but there are no loads, and the ground too, unfit for loads, and the light too, down towards an end it seems can never come. For what possible end to these wastes where true light never was, nor any upright thing, nor any true foundation, but only these leaning things, forever lapsing and crumbling away, beneath a sky without memory of morning or hope of night. These things, what things, come from where, made of what? And it says that here n
othing stirs, has never stirred, will never stir, except myself, who do not stir either, when I am there, but see and am seen. Yes, a world at an end, in spite of appearances, its end brought it forth, ending it began, is that clear enough? And I too am at an end, when I am there, my eyes close, my sufferings cease and I end, I wither as the living can not. (p. 40)

  This is not the voice of an individual, a ‘character’ (in this case Molloy), but the communal voice of much of Beckett’s fiction from Molloy onwards. It is a voice that seems to echo, or take dictation from, another remoter and more mysterious voice (except that in this universe all mysteries are without mystery, or – to say the equivalent – everything is equally mysterious, equally baffling to the intellect), a voice which describes a dreamlike, terminal world where the sun barely gives off heat or light and life barely clings to the surface of the planet.

  During the 1930s Beckett underwent analysis with Wilfred Bion, who was later to establish himself as a leader in the British school of psychoanalysis. Beckett’s experience with Bion led him to place greater and greater trust in free association and the so-called talking cure, not simply as a therapeutic method but also as a way of getting in touch with a source which it is futile to name as either the Self or the Other and is therefore best left under the name Beckett himself offered: L’Innommable. What he came to trust about the talking cure, in specific, was the onus it placed on the patient to talk and keep talking without reflecting on the meaning of what he was saying and without wondering when or whether he had come to the point or come to the end.

  The talking cure is the basis of passages like the one quoted above, but only the basis. The great achievement of Molloy is to allow the doubting, interrogatory intellect, frowned upon in psychotherapy, back into the prose, so that – miraculously – the monologue is able to proceed without interruption, without breakdown, without silences, while the formulae and automatisms of the language can nevertheless be isolated and held up for sceptical inspection.